Monday Movie Review – Crossworlds (1996)

After my last review of Parallels, I really wanted to find another movie in that same Sliders type vein with world hopping alternate realities. Then, what would you know, Netflix suggests to me a little film called Crossworlds. It has the description “After he discovers that the pendant his dad left him holds the key to interdimensional travel, a college student is drawn into a battle to save Earth.” and it stars Rutger Hauer? Well hot damn, this sounds great. What could possibly go wrong?

Things that went wrong: It was an incomprehensible mess of confused ideas. Interdimensional travel restricted to parking lots and that desert where Kirk fought a lizard guy. Highlight of the movie is a scene where Jack Black encourages Josh “That guy from Dead Poet’s Society but not the one you’re thinking of” Charles to hit on a girl by making Jack Black noises. Nothing brought up in the background of the movie is ever explained or even generally shown on screen. A normal man meets a badass woman but ends up being the real badass by the end and saves everyone while she is incapacitated.

So yeah, the movie has Josh Charles as Joe Talbot, a college kid that may or may not be a deadbeat but might be a good kid. He sees a girl at a party that disappears but later reappears in his bedroom and then hijinks ensue as people try to kill him for his necklace which belonged to his father who may or may not have been from another dimension. They team up with Rutger Hauer, who’s phoning it in as hard as he can, and they fight some kind of other-dimensional corporation that wants to do vaguely menacing things to Earth that are never fleshed out and they need the amulet because it lets you open the way between the dimensions even though they are all already able to go back and forth seemingly at will. The CEO of Vague Menace Inc. also has pretty much fiat-power of doing whatever he wants like making statues come to life, causing you to hallucinate that the elevator is gone except is actually is (?), and turning his body into Stretch Armstrong when he is hit with a stick.

The most disappointing thing is that the whole “interdimensional war” aspect is mostly glossed over and ignored in favor of incredibly bland chase scenes and running around in sand. There is supposed to be this entire resistance on another dimension fighting the bad guys and all we get is short scene at the end where the resistance is apparently ten dudes in silver pants using a Tandy computer they found in a Radioshack dumpster. All we know about the other dimension is that there is sand and a red filter over everything. God dammit. You cannot tell me your movie is about hopping dimensions and then spend 98% of the movie on regular boring-ass Earth. Give me something to work with here.

Unless you are a Rutger Hauer superfan (and really aren’t we all) then I can’t really recommend watching the movie. I give it a 1.5 out of 5 and wish I could get that hour and a half of my life back.

Favorite thing in the movie: Jack Black showing up and being all Jack Black